Les Misérables, v. 2/5: Cosette

by Victor Hugo

  CHAPTER VII.

  NAPOLEON IN GOOD HUMOR.

  The Emperor, although ill, and though a local pain made ridinguncomfortable, had never been so good-tempered as on this day. Fromthe morning his impenetrability had been smiling, and on June 18,1815, this profound soul, coated with granite, was radiant. The manwho had been sombre at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The greatestpredestined men offer these contradictions, for our joys are a shadow,and the supreme smile belongs to God. _Ridet Cæsar, Pompeius flebit_,the legionaries of the Fulminatrix legion used to say. On this occasionPompey was not destined to weep, but it is certain that Cæsar laughed.At one o'clock in the morning, amid the rain and storm, he had exploredwith Bertrand the hills near Rossomme, and was pleased to see the longlines of English fires illumining the horizon from Frischemont toBraine l'Alleud. It seemed to him as if destiny had made an appointmentwith him on a fixed day and was punctual. He stopped his horse, andremained for some time motionless, looking at the lightning andlistening to the thunder. The fatalist was heard to cast into the nightthe mysterious words,--"We are agreed." Napoleon was mistaken; theywere no longer agreed.

  He had not slept for a moment: all the instants of the past nighthad been marked with joy for him. He rode through the entire line ofmain guards, stopping every now and then to speak to the videttes. Athalf-past two he heard the sound of a marching column near Hougomont,and believed for a moment in a retreat on the side of Wellington. Hesaid to Bertrand,--"The English rear-guard is preparing to decamp. Ishall take prisoners the six thousand English who have just landed atOstend." He talked cheerfully, and had regained the spirits he haddisplayed during the landing of March 1st, when he showed the GrandMarshal the enthusiastic peasant of the Juan Gulf, and said,--"Well,Bertrand, here is a reinforcement already." On the night between June17 and 18 he made fun of Wellington. "This little Englishman requiresa lesson," said Napoleon. The rain became twice as violent, and itthundered while the Emperor was speaking. At half-past three A.M. helost one illusion: officers sent to reconnoitre informed him thatthe enemy was making no movement. Nothing was stirring, not a singlebivouac fire was extinguished, and the English army was sleeping. Thesilence was profound on earth, and there was only noise in the heavens.At four o'clock a peasant was brought to him by the scouts: thispeasant had served as guide to a brigade of English cavalry, probablyVivian's, which had taken up a position on the extreme left in thevillage of Ohain. At five o'clock two Belgian deserters informed himthat they had just left their regiments, and the English army meantfighting. "All the better," cried Napoleon; "I would sooner crush themthan drive them back."

  At daybreak he dismounted on the slope which forms the angle of thePlancenoit road, had a kitchen table and a peasant chair brought fromthe farm of Rossomme, sat down with a truss of straw for a carpet, andlaid on the table the map of the battlefield, saying to Soult,--"Itis a pretty chess-board." Owing to the night rain, the commissariatwagons, which stuck in the muddy roads, did not arrive by daybreak.The troops had not slept, were wet through and fasting; but this didnot prevent Napoleon from exclaiming cheerfully to Soult,--"We haveninety chances out of a hundred in our favor." At eight o'clock theEmperor's breakfast was brought, and he invited several generals toshare it with him. While breakfasting, somebody said that Wellingtonhad been the last evening but one at a ball in Brussels, and Soult,the rough soldier with his archbishop's face, remarked, "The ball willbe to-day." The Emperor teased Ney for saying,--"Wellington will notbe so simple as to wait for your Majesty." This was his usual manner."He was fond of a joke," says Fleury de Chaboulon; "The basis of hischaracter was a pleasant humor," says Gourgaud; "He abounded withjests, more peculiar than witty," says Benjamin Constant. This gayetyof the giant is worth dwelling on: it was he who called his Grenadiers"Growlers;" he pinched their ears and pulled their moustachios. "TheEmperor was always playing tricks with us," was a remark made by oneof them. During the mysterious passage from Elba to France, on February27, the French brig of war, the _Zephyr_, met the _Inconstant_, onboard which Napoleon was concealed, and inquiring after Napoleon, theEmperor, who still had in his hat the white and violet cockade studdedwith bees which he had adopted at Elba, himself laughingly took up thespeaking-trumpet, and answered,--"The Emperor is quite well." A manwho jests in this way is on familiar terms with events. Napoleon hadseveral outbursts of this laughter during the breakfast of Waterloo:after breakfast he reflected for a quarter of an hour; then twogenerals sat down on the truss of straw with a pen in their hand and asheet of paper on their knee, and the Emperor dictated to them the planof the battle.

  At nine o'clock, the moment when the French army, échelonned andmoving in five columns, began to deploy, the divisions in two lines,the artillery between, the bands in front, drums rattling andbugles braying,--a powerful, mighty, joyous army, a sea of bayonetsand helmets on the horizon, the Emperor, much affected, twiceexclaimed,--"Magnificent! magnificent!"

  Between nine and half-past ten, although it seems incredible, thewhole army took up position, and was drawn up in six lines, forming,to repeat the Emperor's expression, "the figure of six V's." A fewminutes after the formation of the line, and in the midst of thatprofound silence which precedes the storm of a battle, the Emperor,seeing three 12-pounder batteries defile, which had been detached byhis orders from Erlon, Reille, and Lobau's brigades, and which wereintended to begin the action at the spot where the Nivelles and Genapperoads crossed, tapped Haxo on the shoulder, and said, "There aretwenty-four pretty girls, General." Sure of the result, he encouragedwith a smile the company of sappers of the first corps as it passedhim, which he had selected to barricade itself in Mont St. Jean, sosoon as the village was carried. All this security was only crossedby one word of human pity: on seeing at his left, at the spot wherethere is now a large tomb, the admirable Scotch Grays massed with theirsuperb horses, he said, "It is a pity." Then he mounted his horse,rode toward Rossomme, and selected as his observatory a narrow stripof grass on the right of the road running from Genappe to Brussels,and this was his second station. The third station, the one he tookat seven in the evening, is formidable,--it is a rather lofty moundwhich still exists, and behind which the guard was massed in a hollow.Around this mound the balls ricochetted on the pavement of the road andreached Napoleon. As at Brienne, he had round his head the whistle ofbullets and canister. Almost at the spot where his horse's hoofs stood,cannon-balls, old sabre-blades, and shapeless rust-eaten projectiles,have been picked up; a few years ago a live shell was dug up, the fuseeof which had broken off. It was at this station that the Emperor saidto his guide, Lacoste, a hostile timid peasant, who was fastened to ahussar's saddle, and tried at each volley of canister to hide himselfbehind Napoleon, "You ass! it is shameful; you will be killed in theback." The person who is writing these lines himself found, whiledigging up the sand in the friable slope of this mound, the remainsof a shell rotted by the oxide of forty-six years, and pieces of ironwhich broke like sticks of barley-sugar between his fingers.

  Everybody is aware that the undulations of the plains on which theencounter between Napoleon and Wellington took place, are no longeras they were on June 18, 1815. On taking from this mournful plainthe material to make a monument, it was deprived of its real relics,and history, disconcerted, no longer recognizes itself; in order toglorify, they disfigured. Wellington, on seeing Waterloo two yearsafter, exclaimed, "My battle-field has been altered." Where the hugepyramid of earth surmounted by a lion how stands, there was a crestwhich on the side of the Nivelles road had a practicable ascent, butwhich on the side of the Genappe road was almost an escarpment. Theelevation of this escarpment may still be imagined by the height ofthe two great tombs which skirt the road from Genappe to Brussels: theEnglish tomb on the left, the German tomb on the right. There is noFrench tomb,--for France the whole plain is a sepulchre. Through thethousands of cart-loads of earth employed in erecting the mound, whichis one hundred and fifty feet high and half a mile in circumference,the plateau of Mont St. Jean is now accessible
by a gentle incline;but on the day of the battle, and especially on the side of La HayeSainte, it was steep and abrupt. The incline was so sharp that theEnglish gunners could not see beneath them the farm situated in thebottom of the valley, which was the centre of the fight. On June 18,1815, the rain had rendered the steep road more difficult, and thetroops not only had to climb up but slipped in the mud. Along thecentre of the crest of the plateau ran a species of ditch, which it wasimpossible for a distant observer to guess. We will state what thisditch was. Braine l'Alleud is a Belgian village and Ohain is another;these villages, both concealed in hollows, are connected by a roadabout a league and a half in length, which traverses an undulatingplain, and frequently buries itself between hills, so as to becomeat certain spots a ravine. In 1815, as to-day, this road crossed thecrest of the plateau of Mont St. Jean: but at the present day it islevel with the ground, while at that time it was a hollow way. The twoslopes have been carried away to form the monumental mound. This roadwas, and still is, a trench for the greater part of the distance,--ahollow trench, in some places twelve feet deep, whose scarped sideswere washed down here and there by the winter rains. Accidents occurredthere: the road was so narrow where it entered Braine l'Alleud, thata wayfarer was crushed there by a wagon, as is proved by a stonecross standing near the grave-yard, which gives the name of the deadman as "Monsieur Bernard Debrye, trader, of Brussels," and the date,"February, 1637." It was so deep on the plateau of Mont St. Jean,that a peasant, one Mathieu Nicaise, was crushed there in 1783 by afall of earth, as is proved by another stone cross, the top of whichdisappeared in the excavations, but whose overthrown pedestal is stillvisible on the grass slope to the left of the road between La HayeSainte and the farm of Mont St. Jean. On the day of the battle, thishollow way, whose existence nothing revealed, a trench on the top ofthe escarpment, a rut hidden in the earth, was invisible, that is tosay, terrible.